There’s a little more buzz whenever the last two Stanley Cup champions get together. Some people out there think this could eventually be a Stanley Cup preview for this season, but the Bruins have plenty of things to figure out with their game before they can start thinking about another deep playoff run. It’s early and they’ll have plenty of time to figure out their issues—but they do have issues.

There’s been some talk of a Stanley Cup hangover swirling around Boston in the early part of this season. The Bruins are off to a 1-3 start and have lost back-to-back games against the Colorado Avalanche and Carolina Hurricanes. Ouch. But they shouldn’t expect any sympathy from their opponents across the ice in Chicago tonight. After all, they went through the exact same thing last season.

All they have to do is look towards the Chicago Blackhawks if they want a cautionary tale. A season ago, the Blackhawks got off to a sluggish start and were constantly chasing opponents in the standings for the entire season. By the final day of the season, they needed a Dallas Stars defeat just to sneak into the playoffs. Their reward for the playoff berth was a date with the extremely talented, surging, and rival Vancouver Canucks. Needless to say, it’s a tougher path starting the playoffs as the 8th seed than it was when they were the 2nd seed and won the Cup.

Some people will tell you the slow start is really what cost the Hawks their season.

Fast-forward to this season and the Bruins are trying to avoid the same fate on the East Coast. The problem is that the early season losing has people looking for answers. Why is this team not as good as the one we saw in June? The roster is relatively the same, so it must be something—which is where the Stanley Cup hangover notion comes from. Defending Vezina/Conn Smyth/greatest ECHLer ever Tim Thomas knows that it can be a self-perpetuating prophecy:

“Of course there are effects [from winning the Cup], but I wouldn’t call it a hangover. By talking about it and by having it brought up in the media all the time, it brings it up into your conscious mind. It gives you an excuse or it allows you to think that way.

“The battle as a player is to not waste your time thinking in negative directions like that, and instead stay positive and in the moment. That was last year and this is a new year. If you want to have success, we need to focus on what each of us need to in each individual period and each individual game.”

Still, Boston has played uninspired hockey through the first week of the season and will look to find a spark against the highly-respected Blackhawks. Hawks’ star Patrick Kane certainly isn’t feeling sorry for the champs though:

“The [Bruins] are a great team. People talk about hangovers, but we lost 9, 10 guys from our team last year. They haven’t lost many and it seems they’ve made some improvements with guys like [Joe] Corvo coming over.

“If anything they’re just as good as last year, especially with guys like [Tim] Thomas and [Zdeno] Chara and their core guys they seem to be in pretty good shape. It will be a good test for sure.”

It’s easy to point towards a Stanley Cup hangover for the Bruins because their losing. The same can be said for the Chicago Blackhawks throughout the entire season last year. If the Hawks were the dominant team they were in 2009-10, there wouldn’t be any Cup hangover stories. Likewise, if the Bruins can find the game that helped them win it all last season, everyone can put this hangover talk to bed—once and for all.

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) As the primary target of opponents over his Hall of Fame career, Wayne Gretzky can certainly empathize with the frustration of Oilers star Connor McDavid.

McDavid and Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Brandon Manning jostled all evening long in a 6-5 Edmonton loss. McDavid denounced the tactics of his opponent after the game, claiming Manning intentionally injured him last season; McDavid missed 37 games with a broken collarbone.

“I guess we can put the whole ‘if he did it’ thing to rest because what he said out there kind of confirmed that,” said McDavid, who taunted Manning after scoring the second goal in the Oilers’ loss.

“I think anybody who knows me or who has played with or against me along the road here, knows that I am not that kind of player,” Manning said, according to a statement released by the Flyers. “I am not out there intentionally trying to hurt people. I’m a guy who plays the game hard and I take pride in that.”

Gretzky didn’t mind seeing that fire in McDavid, saying competitiveness is part of what makes the great ones great. And he said the targeting comes with the territory of being a superstar. It was something he and Mario Lemieux dealt with, too.

“And Connor, he’s going to get tested every night, but this is not new for him,” Gretzky said Friday at the NHL board of governors meetings. “He’s been tested since he was a kid and then playing junior hockey and now in the NHL and he’s always responded and done his part.”

After 18 starts, Bishop is 8-10-1 with a .906 save percentage. He got the hook after two periods last night at Amalie Arena, where he surrendered four goals to the Vancouver Canucks in a 5-1 loss.

Last night marked the third time in his last five starts that he’d surrendered at least four goals, and one of the goals he allowed looked like this:

So, do things feel different this season?

“I feel fine,” Bishop said today, per Lightning Insider. “We go back and watch the games and technically it’s all there. There is really no difference from the way I’ve played the last couple of years to now. I don’t like saying this, but it’s been a strange season with goofy goals on tips and bounces, goals off your own players. So I think if you took some of those away, the numbers would be pretty similar to years past. I would like to get the wins a little higher.”

Bishop, of course, is a pending unrestricted free agent who is unlikely to re-sign with the Lightning. Andrei Vasilevskiy appears to be the goalie of the future in Tampa Bay. On July 1, the 22-year-old re-signed through 2019-20.